Why Marriage Doesn’t End Poverty

By the Editors -
Jan 30, 2014

Conservatives are once again touting
marriage as the way out of poverty. They point to U.S. census
data showing that poverty is concentrated in single-parent
families and that marriage is highly correlated with more
successful households and higher-achieving children.

Not so fast. Marriage by itself doesn’t lift people out of
poverty -- certainly not as well as policies that encourage and
enable parents to work.

Equally important, correlation isn’t the same as causation.
If it were, we’d be celebrating the decline of marriage. After
all, in the past 50 years, poverty has decreased along with the
rate of marriage.

The conservative argument, at any rate, is largely
definitional. The government set the 2013 poverty level at
$15,510 for a single parent with one child. If that parent
married another single parent, and they each earned a below-poverty $15,000, their combined income of $30,000 would
automatically put them above the official poverty line of
$23,550 for a family of four.

In some circumstances, marriage may even be the wrong
answer. Is it better, for example, to raise children in a home
where the two parents are constantly fighting? In one study of
single mothers, more than two-thirds of those who married ended
up divorced by the time they were 35 to 44, at which point they
were worse off economically than if they had stayed single.

It’s also possible that the absence of marriage doesn’t
cause poverty but that poverty causes less marriage. Black
women, who make up a disproportionate number of single mothers,
tell researchers they would like to be married but too often
that means having another mouth to feed. To a statistician,
marriage may make sense, but to many women, it doesn’t.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Republican
presidential aspirant who has taken up the issue, is right to
worry about the consequences when children are raised by poor,
single parents. But if we’re to be guided by the data, he could
just as well tell parents “Go to college” as “Get married.”
In 2009, the median income of families headed by a parent with a
college degree was $100,000. The median income of households
headed by a high-school dropout was $31,000.

What must come first are investments in poor children,
regardless of their parents’ marital status. The U.S. needs
policies that encourage kids to stay in school, and parents to
work, and then supplements the incomes of the working poor. This
path has more bipartisan support than direct cash benefits to
able-bodied adults do.

And it works, as President Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms
demonstrated. Two other programs, the child tax credit and the
earned income tax credit, have reduced poverty more than any
other federal program except Social Security. Because they are
available only to workers, the tax credits encourage parents,
single or not, to stay employed. And because the credits are
refundable, even those with no income-tax liability benefit.

In his State of the Union speech this week, President
Barack Obama was right to propose an expansion of the earned
income tax credit to help childless workers who now qualify for
only a minuscule sum. Rubio supports the concept, having
proposed direct wage subsidies for all working poor adults,
including the childless. So long as Rubio doesn’t envision
cutting benefits to working parents in order to cover childless
adults, it seems there are grounds for a Rubio-Obama deal.

In some cases, of course, marriage can benefit working
parents. But there are more effective and efficient ways for the
government to reduce poverty. To suggest otherwise is to engage
in a false debate.